crisp [OE] To the Anglo-Saxons curly or frizzy hair was crisp. The word comes from Latin crispus ‘curled’. Perhaps because of the sound of the word, it started to be used to mean ‘brittle’ in the early 16th century, though it is not entirely clear why. Potato crisps first appeared under that name during the 1920s. The first edible crisps, though, were described in medieval cookery books and were crisp pastries made by dropping batter into boiling fat, like doughnuts. Crisp was also an old term for the ‘crackling’ of roast pork, and this may be the sense behind the phrase burned to a crisp [M19th].